While the second drowning had been a mistake – he’d wanted very much to live, and to live with her – he would have followed her into the ocean, had she asked it of him. He would have followed her off a cliff, into the jaws of those monsters that had hunted them, into anywhere she led him.
(He would follow her still, if she started walking to the ocean, asked him to follow. He would die again beside her.)
But he doesn’t ponder on him much, because he is too focused on the way she traces his body for the moment that is too brief. Familiar as breathing. There’d been many days like that, where they’d wandered together, bodies touching, those too-brief and too-glorious days before the darkness had settled over them, before they’d known what it was like to be hunted.
(He’d give anything to have those days back. He’d die a thousand times to have them back.)
(He could tell her. He could whisper those things the magician said and hope to god they weren’t lies. But what would that do to her? He knows he is a burden, and though she once carried the weight of loving him, he does not want to ask that of her again. Does not want her saddled with it.)
“Yes,” he agrees, “I don’t think I’ve been this happy in quite some time.”
Not since the last time he was with her, before they heard the chuffing breaths of the monsters, before the world fell apart.
The sun sets fully now, the last strains of light on the water. He swallows. He knows he has to leave, that to continue this would overstay his welcome, even as she says I’ll be sorry to see you go.
“Agetta…” he begins and there is so much he wants to say and so much he cannot say, “thank you. I know myself again, and it’s…well, I’m glad for it.”
He touches her again and he hopes the desperation he feels isn’t palpable in his touch. He has never been much of a liar.
“I should go,” he says, “but I’ll see you again.”
He shouldn’t, of course. Could he bear the pain of seeing her again, like this?
Could he bear the pain of not seeing her?
He moves into the growing darkness, and the sound of waves grows fainter, until he cannot hear it at all.
@Agetta